"This is a beautifully written and carefully researched book that offers fascinating inter-cultural connections which are bound to stimulate further thought. In a Scotland where no lack of intellectuals are seemingly intent on re-making national identity and reimagining the past, it is a book that some of them might even profit from dipping into." --Tom Gallagher, Scottish Affairs 25: 1 (2016) "Pine's strength as a commentator comes from his meditative, associative, habit of mind. His readings constantly deepen our sense of complexity and modernity." --Seamus Heaney "In The Disappointed Bridge, Richard Pine has given us a sweeping reflection on Ireland's place in the post-colonial world. As he tells us in the opening pages, the ideas here began percolating in the 1980s, and have evolved over the past three decades. As such, what we have in The Disappointed Bridge can be read as an archaeology of Irish post-colonial criticism, beginning in the first excitement of the explanatory power of what was once a new critical paradigm, and then mutating in increasingly interesting ways as the place of Ireland in the post-colonial world developed in complexity and nuance. Indeed, underpinning The Disappointed Bridge is a spatial logic; it begins in a series of seminars in Berkeley, California, but it spirals outwards to take in Greece, Africa, India, Latin America and Transylvania, with Ireland always somewhere in the reckoning.

As a map of the concerns of one of the most engaged scholars in Irish Studies, The Disappointed Bridge does not disappoint." --Professor Chris Morash, Trinity College, Dublin "A thoughtful, nuanced interrogation of Irish contemporary culture and Ireland's cultural and historical links to Europe and farther afield, reflecting on music, drama, literature and political identity from a particular angle to the universe--widely-read, sometimes astringent, and always well worth paying attention to." --Professor Roy Foster, Hertford College, University of Oxford.